David Wheatley was born in 1970. He is the author of various collections
of poetry and lives in rural Aberdeenshire. The Reed Bunting Unseen arises
from a visit to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta and
other Scottish locations in 2012.

Cover illustration: R. Healy.

See below for an extract.

from The Reed Bunting Unseen: A Camouflage Garden for Ian
Hamilton Finlay

F

Little Sparta/Spandau

Arriving in Britain from
the Bahamas in the 1940s, the young Ian Hamilton Finlay was disoriented
by the wartime absence for security reasons of road-signs. Making
his way to Oxford, where he hoped to stay with Sidney Keyes, he
was mistaken for a German parachutist, an episode from which he
extricated himself only with some difficulty. Contemporaneously
a genuine parachutist, Rudolf Hess, was dropping into Scotland
on unspecified business. It has been suggested that Hess hoped
to meet Ian Hamilton – not to be confused with the Scot’s near-namesake,
let alone the younger English poet of the same name – considered
to be the most Germanophile member of Churchill’s cabinet, to
hammer out who knows what dastardly alternative Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact. If so, his capture meant the trip came to nothing more than
a dress rehearsal for Hess’s long post-war years of confinement
in Spandau. Later in life, Ian Hamilton Finlay would dream of
recreating the garden created in prison by Hess’s brother in arms,
Albert Speer. Finlay’s fascination with SS paraphernalia has discomfited
many, but while the martial fantasies that fuel his work represent
one obvious source, Finlay’s agoraphobia may have played its part
too, confining him as it did to his Stonypath home for thirty
years. (Speer, meanwhile, dealt with his own confinement by ‘walking’
round the world in the exercise yard at Spandau, using guidebooks
and maps to chart his route from country to country, proceeding
eastwards through Asia and Siberia before crossing the Bering
Strait and ending his ‘journey’ in Mexico.) To one unable to cross
the street to insult his enemies, the leap from an angry letter
to the Arts Council to Blitzkrieg of the imagination, if one might
so characterise Finlay’s flyting campaigns, is short and seductive.
A garden is not a retreat, Finlay insisted, it is an attack.
Equally, if tirade upon tirade is what one’s audience deserves,
why not swing to the other extreme and give them, on one level
at least, precisely nothing (concrete poetry is a silent
poetry, Finlay insisted, for all that MacDiarmid associated Finlay
with the noisy ‘happenings’ of Alexander Trocchi and other ‘cosmopolitan
scum’ of the 1960s). Rarely can a silence have been as broodingly
aggressive as Finlay’s.

To
return to Rudolf Hess: as a student I met an American whose father
had been the German’s prison doctor in Spandau. Hess lost a rib
in the First World War, he told me, but the man in Spandau was
in possession of the full set. Here was a classic urban myth,
the stand-in/fall-guy content to serve out long decades in prison
while the true Hess luxuriated in Odessa File
exile in Paraguay or Brazil. Had he ventured beyond the bounds
of Little Sparta, who knows what mischief Ian Hamilton Finlay
might have got up to. Instead, he made of himself an ecstatic
prisoner of the imagination. But to paraphrase Jean Genet, better
to become un captif amoureux
than set a thousand prisoners free. Who has been freer than Finlay,
between his impotent, house-bound rage, and its accompanying world-conjuring,
world-dismissing imaginative fiat?
Il faut cultiver son jardin? Il faut cultiver
sa prison.

First Contact

‘In the event of unforeseen
parachute release, proceed with extreme caution. Remember your
training. Establish and confirm your exact location as far as
possible. Remove all identifying insignia from clothing, destroy
all incriminating documents, and avoid unnecessary civilian contact.
If in a group and challenged by parties unknown, allow your superior
or the most confident member of your company (French- or German-speaking)
to speak on your behalf. If suspicion is not aroused on first
contact and subsequently, do not become over-familiar with locals.
Your position will remain at all times precarious. Expression
of political opinions is strongly discouraged. If in need of shelter
or a hiding place, outbuildings and gardens are especially recommended.’
(Parachute Operations: Training and Preparedness,
RAF, 1940)